Is it that these glowing words recall to Abelard what she has utterly forgotten, and what she was too tender and disinterested a spirit even to remember? He cannot rise to the height of her great argument. “Fuyez, que je ne vous revoie jamais,” he replies. “Votre présence est un supplice, laissez moi!” Her answer reveals the secret of her whole nature:—
En vérité, je ne vous comprends pas. Vous êtes malheureux, opprimé, abandonné, et vous repoussez le seul être au monde qui vous aime et qui vous reste.
But it is all in vain. She still fails to understand him, and, with the faith and humility of all true love, she asks if she has offended him:—
Non, je ne suis pas offensé, remettez-vous, je vous remercie. Héloïse, vous êtes bonne et dévouée, je suis profondement touché de vos soins. Vous allez retourner à votre monastère. Vous savez combien cette maison a besoin de votre présence; ne m’oubliez pas, priez pour moi, vous et vos religieuses.
Growing still colder, his last words are, “Adieu, Madame, je me recommande à vos prières.” She kisses his hand, and exclaims, “Et qui priera pour moi?”
The Fifth Act, entitled “La Mort,” is passed in the Convent of Cluny, where Abelard is a sort of ecclesiastical prisoner under the supervision of Saint Bernard. His one sole desire is to make a pilgrimage to Rome, to explain his doctrines to the Pope, and to get the ban of heresy removed from his teaching. But he is broken in health, and troubled in brain. His mind wanders. In sleep he murmurs the name of Eloisa. His sole consolation is the faithful attachment of a former pupil, who brings him ever and anon news of her who is living and praying at Paracleta. At last he expires; and the drama closes with the tolling of the convent bell.
I have given, I fear, but an inadequate idea of the merits of the play; for its chief value is in the full and varied picture it presents of the life and manners of the time. It is almost needless to say that it is not a stage but a closet drama, and it has the necessary defect of every such composition; it is a little wearisome. But no form, and no treatment, could blunt the interest that must ever cling to the pathetic story of Abelard and Eloisa; and I should be surprised to hear that any reader could close the book without feeling that it is suffused with the lachrymæ rerum that unfailingly touch the human heart.
For the rest, I do not know that anyone could treat the story of the unhappy lovers of the Paraclete, imaginatively, in such a way as to disarm criticism. I do not refer to any technical difficulty, arising out of the central catastrophe in Abelard’s life. To the true imaginative artist, that would mean as little as it meant to Eloisa. Indeed, it would assist him to obtain compassion for Abelard, just as it made Eloisa love him only all the more. It is the something beyond compassion of which Abelard stands in need, that would baffle the most skilful artistic handling. He would necessarily have to be the hero, and, unfortunately, he is not heroic. Were it not that such a woman as Eloisa loved him, I should be inclined to say that he was hateful. I doubt if there ever lived the man altogether worthy of such a love as hers; yet one would be sorry to think that hundreds of men do not exist more worthy of it than he was. One forgives him much for her sake; yet it is her perfection that makes him look the more imperfect. The contrast between her simplicity and his complexity, between her single-minded devotion to him and his many-sided calculations of what would be best for himself, ends by making him odious; and one is compelled to acknowledge the truth of that bitter saying of Rousseau, “Tout homme réflechi est méchant.”
It is to no man-of-letters, recent or remote, neither to Bussy-Rabutin nor to Colardeau, neither to Pope nor to De Rémusat, but to the famous Correspondence of the pathetic pair, that we must turn if we are to understand either their character or their story. The first letter is written by Abelard, not to Eloisa, but to “a Friend,” and relates the leading incidents of his life. Nowhere, it has often been remarked, does a man so thoroughly, because so unconsciously, betray the secret of his disposition as in his letters. Raconter mon histoire is, to this day, a favorite occupation with Frenchmen; and Abelard is garrulous about his own merits, his own grief, his own successes. He speaks contemptuously of William of Champeaux, and with just as little respect of Anselm of Laon. It was, however, customary in the Middle Ages for controversialists to treat each other with scant courtesy; the flattering consideration which people who sneer at each other in private nowadays exhibit towards each other in public not having yet come into fashion. It is when Abelard narrates how he made the acquaintance of Eloisa that we get the full measure of his fundamentally coarse and selfish nature. Fancy a man writing of a woman who had loved him, and loved him as Eloisa loved Abelard, that she was per faciem non infima, or, as we should say in English, “not bad-looking”! Fancy his being able to remember, let alone to describe without intolerable shame, that, having heard of her accomplishments, he deliberately planned to win her affections, adding that he felt sure this would be easy, because “tanti quippe tunc nominis eram, et juventutis et formæ gratia præeminebam, ut quamcunque feminarum nostro dignarer amore nullam vererer repulsam,” that he was so celebrated, so young, and so good-looking, that he had no fear of being repulsed by any woman whom he honored with his love! The repugnance inspired by such language would be great, even if he had afterwards appreciated the prize he had begun by coveting so basely. It is not easy to forgive Saint Augustine for his conduct towards the mother of Deodatus. But he, at least, describes the passions of his youth with sincere humility and profound remorse; whilst Abelard recalls without a pang the colloquies and correspondence he planned in order to influence Eloisa. In the same spirit he narrates the tender, passionate passages that ensued. He is equally ignoble when Fulbert discovers their attachment. He excuses himself by reminding her uncle “quanta ruina summos quoque viros ab ipso statim humani generis exordio mulieres dejecerint,” how many of the greatest men, from the beginning of time, have been ruined by the seductions of women. By way of compensation, he tells us that he offered to marry Eloisa on condition that their union should be kept secret, ne famæ detrimentum caperem, lest, forsooth, his fame should suffer detriment. If, instead of hiring a couple of bravos Fulbert had taken him by the heels and flung him into the Seine, one’s sense of justice would have been better satisfied.
Turn we a moment from the composed reminiscences of this circumspect dialectician, to the woman per faciem non infima, whose heart he had broken and whose life he had ruined. In obedience to his wish she had taken the veil, and writes to him from the Convent of the Paraclete, made over to her by him, and of which she was now the Lady Abbess. She has read his letter “To a friend,” of which she says, with unconscious irony, that though it was composed to soothe that friend’s sorrows, it is full of the sorrows of the writer himself. She finds this the most natural thing in the world; and all she asks is that to her, too, he will write, and that he will instruct her, who gave herself entirely to him, how to direct those who have given themselves entirely to God. She reminds him, not reproachfully, but in order to convince him that she has need of him still, that at a word from him she had completed her own ruin, and that, though he was the only object of her love, she had promptly taken the veil at his bidding, “ut te tam corporis mei quam animi unicum possessorum ostenderem,” in order to show that she belonged to him, and to him alone, body, heart, and soul. “God is my witness,” she goes on, “that in loving you I loved yourself only, not anything you could give or bring me.” Then, going to the utmost limit and horizon of feminine love and self-sacrifice, she adds: “Et si uxoris nomen sanctius ac validus videtur, dulcius mihi semper extitit amicæ vocabulum; aut, si non indigneris, concubinæ vel scorti; ut, quo me videlicet pro te amplius humiliarem, ampliorem apud te consequerer gratiam, et sic etiam excellentiæ tuæ gloriam minus læderem.” How completely Pope has falsified this sentiment in his famous paraphrase! His Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard is, no doubt, an admirable composition; but it is unfair to Eloisa, since its main note is passion, not self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice was the beginning, middle, and end of her love for Abelard. Once only she reproaches him. He had made her take the religious habit before assuming it himself. Why? Did he doubt her? She is overwhelmed with grief at the thought; for does he not know that she would have gladly either preceded or followed him into the jaws of hell? Nay, she must perforce have done so, for her heart was not hers, but his. Why, then, does he not write and console her? Was it concupiscence, rather than affection, that made them one? For her part, she has no difficulty in answering the question. “Dum tecum carnali fruerer voluptate, utrum id amore vel libidine agerem incertum pluribus habebatur.” Can they, she asks, be in any doubt now? “Nunc enim finis indicat quo id inchoaverrim principio.” The end surely shows by what motive she was impelled at the beginning. Everything she has given up—himself, the world, pleasure, and freedom; reserving to herself nothing but the luxury of still executing his will. Of a truth, it was so; and reading this extraordinary correspondence, anyone who is curious on the subject may discover for himself the eternal distinction between